Welcome to the Love in Bloom Giveaway Hop, hosted by I Am A Reader, Not A Writer & Portrait of a Book.

The idea of the “hop” is that a whole bunch of blogs plan different giveaways, then link up to make it easier for visitors to find and enter them. This hop runs from Thursday, May 16, 2013 to Wednesday, May 22, 2013. The winner will be announced on the Rafflecopter form on Thursday, May 23, 2013.

For this hop, I’m giving away a copy of Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.

Description (from Goodreads):

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks on over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot-searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion-along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.

Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams

Contest open internationally.

a Rafflecopter giveaway